Gay World Cup kicks off in Buenos Aires

Twenty-eight teams and about 480 players from Europe, Iceland, Australia, South America, the US and Canada descended on Buenos Aires at the weekend for the annual Gay World Cup, the first played in Latin America.

A decade-old championship run by the International Gay and Lesbian Football Association (IGLFA), this year's cup combines Argentina's love of the sport with Buenos Aires's arrival as a top gay travel destination.

The event will kick off today on six refurbished fields in the city's Parque Sarmiento. "It's got kind of a Mediterranean feel," said Bill White, 45, a Southwark Council employee and backup forward for the defending cup champions Stonewall FC. "They seem quite happy to have us. We have a little novelty value. But there's no raised eyebrows or scowls."

Buenos Aires has emerged as a gay destination through a mixture of planning and luck. An active nightlife and arts scene, a gay-friendly atmosphere signified by the city's 2002 approval of South America's first domestic partner law, and bargain prices caused by the 2002 peso devaluation put it on the gay travel map.

The Buenos Aires municipal website sells the concept of a gay-friendly city, where gay people are accepted but there are no "gay ghettos" like London's Soho or San Francisco's Castro district. "In Buenos Aires you can get European experience but at one-third the price," says Carlos Melia, founder of Pride Travel, the self-proclaimed first gay travel agency in Argentina. "And it's mixed. We don't have a gay neighbourhood."

According to a 2006 survey by Alfacrux, a tourism marketing consultancy headed by Hernán Lombardi, the national minister of tourism under former Argentine President Fernando de la Rúa, about 450,000 gay tourists come to Buenos Aires each year, 15% of the total.

"It seemed like a dream to bring the championship to a Latin American city, especially to Buenos Aires where football is so important," says Norberto Selasco, the Buenos Aires-born marketing director of the IGLFA.